Tuesday, 26 July 2016

The coffee break is , apart from the salary , the best thing about working . Once you retire you'll need to find a substitute .
You know how a horse can point one ear to locate a sound ? Well , when you don't meet so many people every day , you'll find you need to develop something similar . Think Lady Bracknell ... actually if you've ever had or worked with small children , you already have .

However busy your hairdresser's is you're never really going to hear anything truly entertaining , holiday destinations apart .
In good Supermarkets , the queues are not allowed to be longer than three customers anymore , so there's less time to 'news-gather'/earwig .

The local paper's quite good ... I know , for instance , that they're collecting money for new gnomes for the city farm and which children have got their swim diploma . Or that if you buy a new bra in Stien's lingerie shop , you'll get a discount if you donate your old one ( they''ll send it to Rumania ... no , I can't think why either ) . But our paper's going on holiday for a couple of weeks .

Which just leaves listening shamelessly to people in cafes or trains

" I'm allergic to everything . I can't help it , I can't eat anything at all ... I don't eat chicken , I don't eat beef , I don't eat pork . I only eat mince ." said the woman in yellow ... but then the bus arrived .

There was the group of women sitting next to me as we all ate sandwiches in the park , who were discussing some their exes , "Well , once he said that , I could see the message behind the message ... " Everyone in a quarter mile radius nodded ...

Or the young girl on the train chronicling her food poisoning over the weekend to her mates , "I'd only had a few vodkas and a Berenburg earlier on Friday and Joris had made something with coconut and cider but I threw up the pea soup straight away on Saturday . Even the tiramisu made me queasy ... "...

In fact , sometimes there doesn't even need to be a conversation .
A young girl waiting for a train in Utrecht was carrying a large bag printed with "Awesome Shoes Take You To Awesome Places "... I hope they had , she was now wearing flip-flops and a BandAid .

Tuesday, 19 July 2016

By dint of working through endless weekends over the winter , supervising the rehousing of her firm's headquarters to larger premises the other side of town , Youngest Daughter earned two extra weeks holiday this summer .The offer of a flat in Budapest , a friend's desire to go to the Opera in Vienna and a love of Italian food ... and she was off on a 2016 version of the Grand Tour .

I'd get 'phone calls from minor airports , Alpine river banks , libraries , forests or street corner cafes ( preferably next to a tram line ) .
She was having the time of her life , and not even a superfluity of " potatoes and pig's elbows " on Munich lunch menus was daunting . A couple of German castles revived her spirits swiftly .

The fact that Prague smelled of forests , had a municipal diving center in the middle
of the city and that the people all seemed to love living there made her want to stay for ever .

A huge park in Salzburg , breakfasts in Budapest , chocolate cakes in Austria , the Kunshistorisches Museum in Vienna and having the Vermeers to herself ... surviving the Marriage of Figaro in a 38C degree Opera House , ... the apericena in Venice with Aperol spritzers and buffets of endless delight , five hours in Florence's Uffizi and some risotto ,

the market and food in Milan and a treasure hunt in its Salvation Army thrift shop made it all most uplifting and every bit as educational as any Grand Tour could hope to be .

The first card is a self portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola , "Her eyes look like mine in a Viennese cake shop "
And the second is Agnolo di Cosimo's portrait of Giovanni de'Medici as a child in the Uffizi ... is it possible to adopt a postcard ?

Sunday, 10 July 2016

The lavender hasn't died . The two cherry tomato plants are looking pale but brave and when I got down on hands and knees and squinted , I counted five tomatoes . One this size , O and four this size .

My Wildflower Plantation , a large-ish earthenware pot , sewn with a packet of Bee and Butterfly attracting plant seeds that the housing association gave each of us this year

has burst forth into one white flower too tiny to identify , two pink ditto , a pretty purple sweetpea affair and a cornflower .

Local bees seem to be reluctant to venture forth however , though I have seen two hoverflies doing their silent best to fill the gap .

Never mind , with a balcony 10 by 6 foot , I was hardly hoping to be self-sufficient but yesterday's paper has a large article on page 2 telling us that due to flooding and hailstorms spinach , paksoi , lettuce and rocket will be in short supply till September , at least ... and I'm already a little tired of carrots ...

It's chicken barley soup for supper and a kiwi fruit .

P.S. The plant pots and labels aren't mine . Not even I am that optimistic . They were stacked ín a corner of the Orangery in Utrecht's Hortus , where the cactii were sheltering from the rain .

About me

SmitoniusAndSonata is a mother and daughter collective blog.
London based Smitonius (Jessamy) makes one of a kind jewellery using vintage buttons, as well as a combination of beads from all over Europe: from lampwork ones by a range of UK artists to vintage and modern glass beads.
Sonata is a miniature quilt maker based in the North of Holland (Leeuwarden). Geraldine Keyzer is already known to collectors of Hitty dolls and owners of vintage dollhouses. She likes to use vintage as well modern cotton to create a range of quilts from simple One Patch to the more complex Grandmother's Garden.